A middle-age Main Street Republican's RAG with straight talk you're not likely to find in the wimped out snooze media.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Time for tax laws that reward growing our economy

I'm a believer in the often-maligned "trickle down" theory.

Under this theory, embraced by Ronald Reagan, when businesses have more money to invest in creating jobs, the money from those profits and those jobs will turn around and trickle down to creating more profits and more jobs. Thus, our economic and tax policy should reward investment and job growth.

The problem is that in the last two decades we've seen corporate greed and incompetence rewarded instead.

When another company gobbles up a competitor, it takes money to do so. That money is taken out of the economy and chances are there will be a loss of jobs rather than job creation.

When a company closes down a plant in the United States and has shirts made in Bangladesh, that creates more jobs in Bangladesh and fewer here.

So this begs the question of whether our economic and tax policies should actually reward the companies who grow from the ground up and those who create jobs. Conversely, shouldn't favorable tax treatment be denied when money is removed from the economy and jobs are sent to other countries?

Maybe we need to start providing disincentives to those businesses who'd rather have toys made with lead based paint in China than paying people to make them here.

And while we're on the subject of equity, Congress needs to play fair with employees who can't fully deduct their reasonable job expenses. Own a business and you can deduct almost anything you spend in order to make money. Work as an employee and the deductions for reasonable job expenses are subject to all kinds of limitations.

We need fair tax laws -- especially those that reward economic growth in this country.